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Hannah Case

Eight Perfect Episodes of TV

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › eight-perfect-episodes-of-tv › 681278

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Few things are more satisfying than watching a show pull off a clever and high-octane episode. For those looking to revisit some greats, our writers and editors answer the question: What do you think is a perfect episode of TV?

The following contains spoilers for the episodes mentioned.

“The Panic in Central Park,” Girls (streaming on Max)

Maybe this is the former theater critic in me coming out, but the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center. Girls, which revolves around four friends in New York City, has always been brilliant at this, and never more so than with “The Panic in Central Park,” a Marnie-centered episode that deals with the particular moment in young adulthood when fantasy becomes untenable.

“The Panic in Central Park,” like the best Girls episodes, is written by Lena Dunham and directed by Richard Shepard. It begins with Desi mournfully reproaching his “cruel” new wife, Marnie, for declining to go get a scone, ends with her asking for a divorce, and riffs on film history, romance, and codependency in between. The high-strung Marnie, out on a walk to clear her head, encounters her ex, Charlie, who’s almost unrecognizable. He whisks her away on a whirlwind New York City adventure involving a consigned red cocktail dress (Millennial Williamsburg’s answer to Pretty Woman), a fake identity, Italian food, a rowboat in Central Park, a robbery, and—finally—the revelation that Charlie is addicted to heroin. A sadder, wiser Marnie walks home barefoot, having accepted the idea that no one is going to save her. The episode is beautiful and incisive about the allure of the stories we wrap ourselves in and the power of shaking them off.

— Sophie Gilbert, staff writer

***

“If It Smells Like a Rat, Give It Cheese,” Survivor: Micronesia (streaming on Hulu and Paramount+)

If I could erase my brain in order to watch anything for the first time again, I would do it for the penultimate episode of Survivor: Micronesia. The 16th season of the reality game show is famously one of the best, and this episode is why. Watching it is like witnessing Alex Honnold climb El Capitan without ropes—except instead of sheer athleticism in the face of seemingly impossible odds, you’re seeing how master manipulators exploit social dynamics to get what they want. It’s the Olympics for those who prefer politics or gossip to sports.

People who haven’t watched Survivor often assume that it’s about “surviving” the wilderness, but it’s always primarily been about surviving human nature. Driven by power and social capital, the show has more in common with Game of Thrones than Naked and Afraid. Explaining exactly what happens in this episode would be like explaining an inside joke; you need to watch the whole season to get why it hits. Just know that it features Red Wedding–level of gameplay, setting the bar high for how far people will go to get ahead.

— Serena Dai, senior editor

***

“C**tgate,” Veep (streaming on Max)

Unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way. But the element of surprise may be why I remember “C**tgate” so many years later. In this episode of Veep, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) orchestrates two tasks that are both impossibly monumental and petty. She has to decide if she is going to bail out a bank owned by her current boyfriend, and she must find out who on her staff called her a “cunt” so loudly in public that it was overheard by a reporter.

These interweaving plots alone would make a perfectly satisfying episode. What makes it golden are two of the funniest, most unexpected subplots in Veep’s run. One involves a focus group for the bumbling White House liaison Jonah Ryan, now running for Congress in New Hampshire, who is workshopping an ad. The second is a surprise announcement by Selina’s daughter, a recurring sad sack who can never get her mother’s attention. Guess who she’s dating?

— Hanna Rosin, senior editor

***

“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” The X-Files (streaming on Hulu)

If you’re seeking out a perfect episode of TV, the richest cache to search is the “case of the week” entries of The X-Files. The show wove an elaborate arc about aliens on Earth but saved most of its best material for the smaller stuff. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” written by Darin Morgan, is a gothic short story, following FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigate a murder with the help of a tetchy local psychic named Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle).

This being The X-Files, Mulder is immediately taken with Bruckman’s clairvoyance, while Scully is skeptical—but Morgan’s script resolves each of Bruckman’s predictions about the future in clever, tragicomic ways, reinforcing Mulder’s belief while also finding ways to affirm Scully’s cynicism. It’s funny, dark, and beautifully acted—particularly between Anderson and Boyle—with an elliptical plot structure that feels wonderfully complex even by today’s TV standards.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

“It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” Grey’s Anatomy (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

I’ve previously written that after more than 20 seasons, it’s time for Grey’s Anatomy to come to an end. But in its early days, the series was responsible for some of the most memorable episodes of television: The second season’s two-part storyline, “It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” demonstrated the show’s mix of humor and drama at its best.

Colloquially known as the “bomb in the body cavity” episodes, they tell the story of a patient who comes in with live ammunition in his chest. At the same time, the show’s powerhouse resident Dr. Miranda Bailey goes into labor, and two other characters perform surgery on her husband, who crashed his car on his way in. In the midst of some very suspenseful plotlines, the dialogue explores the relationships among, and vulnerabilities of, the characters in a beautifully human way. On a show that’s known for putting people in harm’s way, this pair of episodes focuses as much on the emotions as on the drama: the fear of losing someone you care about, and what it really means to be in love.

— Kate Guarino, supervisory senior associate editor

***

Season 2, Episode 10, The Mole (streaming on Netflix)

The Season 2 finale of Netflix’s reboot of The Mole is made perfect if you first watch all of the other episodes. The show’s formula is simple: 12 people collaborate on Indiana Jones–style missions to earn money for a prize pot, but one of them is a “mole” hired by the producers to sabotage the other contestants. Elimination isn’t based on your performance in missions. It’s about how accurately you identify the mole, according to your answers on a quiz given each round.

What results is sumptuous chaos, set among abandoned buildings and real explosives that make you wonder what the release form for this show must look like. Everyone is pretending to be the mole (to mislead others) while testing their fellow players (to figure out who the mole is) and still, somehow, trying to collect money for the prize pot. Oh, and did I mention that Ari Shapiro of All Things Considered fame is this season’s host?

I won’t spoil the finale, but it involves minefields and three equally mole-like characters. There’s not a single weak link in this episode, and if you correctly guess who the mole is, you’ll have bested much of the internet.

— Katherine Hu, assistant editor

***

“Chocolate With Nuts,” SpongeBob SquarePants (streaming on Paramount+)

At about 11 minutes per segment, SpongeBob SquarePants doesn’t have much room to play around with. But its best episodes use that brevity to their advantage, stuffing in visual gags, one-liners, callbacks, goofy voice acting, and witty repartee. “Chocolate With Nuts,” from the third season, is the greatest example of the show’s “run out the clock” ethos: SpongeBob and his best friend, Patrick, become chocolate-bar salesmen to achieve “fancy living.” Their ensuing door-to-door journey introduces them to a cavalcade of bizarre Bikini Bottom dwellers, including a seemingly immortal, shriveled-up fish and a man who feigns “glass bones” syndrome in one of many efforts to dupe the boys into buying chocolate from him instead.

More than most episodes of this kids’ cartoon, “Chocolate With Nuts” threads the needle between the juvenile hijinks and some more adult themes: the empty promise of the good life, the uphill battle of entrepreneurship, the fallacy of “trust thy neighbor.” That headiness is all conveyed through SpongeBob’s elastic face and Patrick’s gobsmacking vacuousness—the best way to explore any nuanced concept, in my view.

But the primary reason I have been rewatching this episode for more than 22 years now is its unassuming density. SpongeBob is wonderfully breezy, but its hidden strength is how layered each joke is: I laugh at different things every time—a certain line delivery, a certain facial expression—and impulsively repeat its most memorable quotes. “Chocolate,” says the pruned old-lady fish, wistfully. “Sweet, sweet chocolate. I always hated it!”

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The anti-social century The army of God comes out of the shadows. The agony of texting with men

The Week Ahead

September 5, a drama film detailing an ABC Sports crew’s efforts to cover the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich (in theaters nationwide Friday) Season 2 of Severance, a sci-fi series about a corporate employee who agrees to surgically “sever” his personal life from his work life (streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday) The JFK Conspiracy, a book by Josh Mensch and Brad Meltzer about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jackson Gibbs

Parents Are Gaming Their Kids’ Credit Scores

By Michael Waters

Several years ago, Hannah Case decided to examine her personal credit history. Case, who was then a researcher at the Federal Reserve, hadn’t gotten her first credit card until she was 22. But as she discovered when she saw her file, she’d apparently been spending responsibly since 14.

Read the full article.

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Parents Are Buying Their Kids Better Credit Scores

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › family › archive › 2025 › 01 › credit-score-authorized-usership-parenting › 681255

Several years ago, Hannah Case decided to examine her personal credit history. Case, who was then a researcher at the Federal Reserve, hadn’t gotten her first credit card until she was 22. But as she discovered when she saw her file, she’d apparently been spending responsibly since 14. After looking into how that could be, she learned that her parents had added her as an “authorized user” on their credit card. That made their spending and payment habits a part of her credit history too—and likely gave Case a starting credit score that was, as she recalls it, already “fairly high.”

Credit scores are meant to be neutral measures of someone’s financial reliability, but in practice, they’re an easy way for some better-off families to give their children an early financial advantage. A range of services promise to help parents ensure that their kids enter adulthood armed with good scores. On TikTok, “generational wealth” influencers tout the benefits of authorized usership. Fintech start-ups, such as Greenlight and GoHenry, advise parents on establishing a credit history for their children. And financial institutions such as Austin Capital Bank promise to improve children’s future credit scores with programs that allow parents to authorize the bank to take out and automatically repay loans in their child’s name.

[Read: Can the flaws in credit scoring be fixed?]

Many parents are taking advantage of these tools. In a 2019 poll commissioned by the consumer-financial-advice website CreditCards.com, 8 percent of the roughly 1,500 American parents surveyed said that at least one of their minor children had a credit card—presumably through authorized usership, because kids under 18 can’t get their own credit card. And data from TransUnion last year showed that nearly 700,000 22-to-24-year-olds had authorized-user accounts. Trying to build credit for kids who haven’t graduated from high school isn’t necessarily new. But as wages stagnate and homeownership slips out of reach, “financial well-being has become more complicated and more precarious for young adults,” Ashley LeBaron-Black, a family-life professor at Brigham Young University, told me. “Parents recognize that, and are trying to prepare their kids.”

These days, your score doesn’t just determine your access to a credit card or a loan. It is your passkey to successful participation in society at large, influencing what job or apartment you can get and how much you might pay for car insurance or a security deposit. But not everyone is set up to receive a good score. Research on the topic is scant, but the scholars I spoke with told me that credit scores are closely tied to race and intergenerational wealth—specifically, who has a legacy of wealth in their family and who does not—and that the gap between who gets a good score and who doesn't can start forming when people are still young. Eighteen- to 20-year-olds from white-majority communities start out with credit scores 24 points higher than those from Black-majority communities, a report from the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization, found. (The paper didn’t mention the affluence of those communities, but on average, white households are wealthier than Black ones.)

This disparity deepens as people get older. In 2021, Black Americans had a median credit score of 639, compared with 730 for white Americans and 752 for Asian Americans. (The maximum score is 850.) And another paper found that people in the lowest income bracket had an average credit score more than 150 points below that of their highest-earning peers. Credit scores are another way for “a lot of economic inequality, disparity, generational-wealth gaps to just be further encoded and passed on,” Yeshimabeit Milner, the founder of the advocacy group Data for Black Lives, told me.

Calculating credit scores is complicated. Algorithms draw on a report that includes information about all of your financial accounts and loans, as well as any bankruptcies. Some factors, such as a long record of repaying debts on time, are associated with higher scores. Others, including a failure to meet payment deadlines or a short credit history, can nudge it down. For young people, this can mean that a good score might seem far-off. Most people in their early 20s will inherently have a short history; you can’t even get a score until you’re 18. But authorized usership lets you begin building your report early.

[Read: An overlooked path to a financial fresh start]

The mechanism, which the Federal Reserve Board introduced in 1975, was originally intended not for children, but for married women, who until the previous year hadn’t been able to get their own credit cards. In an effort to ensure that these women’s long spending and payment histories wouldn’t be invisible, the Federal Reserve ruled that they could retroactively assume part of their husband’s credit history. Inadvertently, this ruling also opened the door for some kids. Now two of the major credit bureaus, Experian and Equifax, recommend authorized usership as a way to improve your report, and FICO, the data-analytics company that produces the country’s most popular credit-scoring algorithm, confirmed to me that being an authorized user “can help those who are new to credit start establishing a credit history.” The company didn’t specify how much of a difference it makes, but one study found that people across the age spectrum with short credit histories saw their score increase by 22.4 points after they were added as an authorized user.

Of course, authorized usership, like many of the most effective ways to build credit young, works only if one’s parents have a high score; inheriting someone else’s unpaid debts will hurt your report. Similarly, using a co-signer to get a good credit card, as 3.7 percent of young Americans do, is another option—but it’s available only to those whose parents have strong credit histories. Case, the former Federal Reserve researcher, found that 18-to-20-year-olds with co-signed cards had scores nearly 50 points higher than those who opened accounts by themselves (though that may be in part because the co-signees also tended to come from wealthier census tracts). On their own, once kids turn 18, they can get what is known as a “secured” credit card by making an upfront cash deposit. But that does little to build their report compared with what “being an authorized user on an American Express gold card could ever do,” Milner said.

Even though young adults’ credit scores often dovetail closely with their parents’ scores, many institutions treat credit scores as personal measures of financial savvy and character. “There’s this idea out there that somehow your credit score is a marker of how responsible and moral of a person you are,” Chi Chi Wu, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told me. Hiring managers study credit reports to evaluate an applicant’s ethics, and some short-lived dating apps even pledged to accept only users with high scores. In reality, however, your score does not reflect your virtuousness. It’s easier for those with an economic cushion to meet payments, and harder for those without that wiggle room—especially if they have a lower credit score and are charged more for things such as car loans and home mortgages. “It’s just a vicious cycle,” Wu told me.

Many people probably don’t think about all of this when they clear their credit-card balances each month. But Case’s research background has prompted her to be more attentive to the ways in which credit scores shape who has access to the American economy and how much interest they must pay for the privilege. It’s hard to trace the logic behind her credit experience (or anyone else’s), because the whole system is opaque, she told me. She can’t know how much of a boost being an authorized user gave her. What she does know is that she didn’t have a problem getting her first credit card or passing her first landlord’s credit check—hurdles that often hold back people with low or nonexistent credit scores. She may have just been starting out, but fair or not, she was already a step ahead.